The trip home - Venice

My daughter Becca just had a short vacation in Italy When we were in Venice (and still on a PCV budget on our way home) we were camping for a week just outside the city at Mestre. We wandered the streets during the day buying our lunch from the pizza shops or other street vendors. I don't think that we sat down in a restaurant for a meal the whole time we were there. I do remember the day that we came upon a shop that had fresh chickens hanging in the window. We decided to have fried chicken for dinner. The other campers thought that we were truly crazy when we brought it back to the campground. There we sat in front of our tent making dinner one dish at a time. We only had one small pot and were cooking on a one-burner camp stove. First we heated up some tea, then made some vegetables the we started to fry that chicken. We breaded it with some semolina we had gotten in a grocery and fried it in some oil that we had gotten also. We could only cook 2 or 3 pieces at a time in the little 6 inch pot. It took hours to cook the whole thing! We had it for breakfast and lunch the next day too, because traveling like we were, we didn't have any cooler either. I think that was one of the most unusual meals that we made while we were on our own at the European end of our trip.

The trip home - Afganistan

This is a comment I posted on the blog of a friend, David Searles, who was our country director during part of our PCV stay in the Philippines.

My husband David and I COS’ed (Close of Service) from the Philippines in January of 1974. We did the “long trip home” for most of the year in 1974. We picked up an English tour bus in Kathmandu called “Swagman Overland Tours”. Needless to say, it was full of Ausies taking their “Walk-abouts”! It was definitely a “budget tourist” way to go. We camped most places, sometimes with the tents that were carried on top of the bus, but often just on our ground pads and sleeping bags out in the open. We went overland from there through India, into Pakistan and into Afganistan. We must have gotten our Afghan visas in India or Pakistan because we didn’t have any problems at the border. Our small problem was at the gate to the pass. We arrived too late in the day to cross all the way to Kabul before dark so were turned back to start again the next day. The border guards said that they couldn’t “protect your women”! We found a hi-way construction camp on the road back to Rawilpindi and the workers allowed us to camp there. We drove through the pass the next day, stopping at a town in the middle for tea. We could have bought all sorts of smuggled goods there from “pen” guns (holding one bullet in a fountain pen) to coke (and not cola). We arrived safely in Kabul in the late afternoon and stayed in a budget hotel there. We celebrated the 4th of July in Bandiamir, camped near the beautiful lake there.